Re: CSS 4?

David Latapie wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Will there be such a thing as CSS4, or will the next step be an sort of 
> XHTML-compatible XSL?

Isn't XSL already?

> Is CSS a dead end (in the middle to long term) or is it supposed to 
> coexist wth XSL?

Well, the purposes of XSL and CSS are clearly different. For example, 
XSL is destructive. Both XSLT and XSL-FO destroys the structure of the 
document by replacing it with a new structure. You can't use the DOM, 
for instance, as it would have been used on the original document, on a 
transformed document. CSS on the other hand is nondestructive. It allows 
styling a structure without changing it. This is something XSL can't do 
at the moment. In fact, if you look at XSLT alone, you see pretty fast 
that it can not do any styling itself. It relies on styling through 
either CSS, DSSSL (or any other styling language) or through native 
styling methods of it's target language (which might be, for instance 
XSL-FO).

You could look at it like this:
XSL-FO    - replaces structure with presentation (destructive)
CSS       - associates structure with presentation (nondestructive)
XSLT      - modifies structure (destructive)
(XBL)     - associates structure with structure (nondestructive)

In addition to these current differences, I believe you would find the 
XML based nondestructive equivalent of CSS far more complicated to use, 
and far more crufty than CSS, if it was added to XSL.
-- 
liorean <mailto:liorean@user.bip.net>

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Received on Friday, 24 October 2003 08:56:40 UTC